Dropping the Hagel Bomb

When I first learned that President Obama was going to appoint former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, to be his Secretary of Defense, I thought, “He’s signaling to Israel to ‘get lost’ and to Iran that ‘we won’t even try to stop you’”. Despite much spinning about Hagel’s exemplary war record and independent thinking, some other people obviously share my view. In an American Spectator article today, Ben Stein makes the following two points:

“You really cannot, in fairness, blame President Obama for naming “Chuck” Hagel, one of the most clearly anti-Israel, anti-Semitic members of the Senate (or ex-members in his case) to be Secretary of Defense. President Obama has not changed his views on Israel since his first speech at the Democrat convention in 2004, when he made it clear that his sympathies in the Middle East lay with the Palestinians. In a way, you have to admire his consistency. Of course, he has to pay lip service to Israel when he visits Miami Beach, but how he must laugh at the audiences that applaud him.”

and

“I hope the people who are supporting Chuck Hagel know that by confirming him, they are cementing at 100 percent that odds that Iran will get a nuclear capability without U.S. interference. Whether Israel can survive an Islamic bomb is questionable at best. This means a vote to confirm Mr. Hagel is a vote that expresses no interest in whether Israel survives.”

Thus some of the worse fears that we had about Obama are about to be realized, 1. that he really hates Israel and would like to see them defeated and replaced by Palestinians in that part of the world we have called Israel since 1947, and 2. that his sympathies are entirely with the Muslim world, and his world view is that it would only be ‘fair’ for a Muslim country (Iran) to have the bomb. All the pretense is over now that the election is over. Next come his ‘oops the mike was open’ promises to the Russians about ‘flexibility’.

You can expect some spin about this move being a bipartisan one, since Hagel is a Republican, and didn’t Clinton appoint a Republican SecDef. Believe me, the reasons are very different. Clinton needed a Republican appointment; Obama doesn’t. This is a clear signal to the rest of the world.